Red Earth, Capcom’s forgotten fighting game, gets a second chance

polygon.com:

Back in the ’90s, Golfland USA was a magical place. On the surface, it looked like any other miniature golf course with a small arcade and ticket counter, but it had one thing going for it that most did not: proximity.

Located in Sunnyvale, California, it was surrounded by many of the companies running the U.S. arcade video game business. Sega was about 20 miles away. Atari was about 10. Capcom just a few. And when those companies needed to test their games, they often dropped them off at Golfland while they were still in development. It wasn’t uncommon to walk in and see games that were not only unreleased, but hadn’t yet been announced.

For a kid obsessed with video game news, this meant everything. I lived a few hundred miles away, but always made a point to stop there when I was in the area. And frequently, I saw games that hadn’t yet been officially unveiled. X-Men vs. Street Fighter. San Francisco Rush 2049. I’d try to take photos for whatever amateur fanzine or website I was working on at the time, and the employees would yell at me to stop. Which might have been more of a liability concern, but it always made it feel like I was seeing something top secret.

On one of those visits, I stumbled onto Red Earth, a new game from Capcom that looked unlike anything I’d seen before. It was a fighting game, but featured an elaborate story mode built around boss battles. It had a versus mode, but only four playable characters. It took place in a strange fantasy world, but with masterful character sprites and animations.

As I learned later, it was the first game for Capcom’s new CPS-3 arcade hardware, which allowed a level of detail unmatched by other 2D games at the time. But more than anything else, it felt like a game